Carl Jung; Red Book; Illustration 121.
Truly; I have shot down a proud enemy; I have forced a greater and stronger one to be my friend. Nothing should separate me from him, the dark one. If I want to leave him, he follows me like my shadow. If I do not think of him, he is still uncannily near.
He will turn into fear if I deny him. I must amply commemorate him, I must prepare a sacrificial meal for him. I fill a plate for him at my table. Much that I would have done earlier for men, I now must do for him. Hence they consider me selfish, for they do not know that I go with my friend, and that many days are consecrated to him. But unrest has moved in, a quiet underground earthquake, a distant great roaring. Ways have been opened to the primordial and to the future. Miracles and terrible mysteries are close at hand. I feel the things that were and that will be. Behind the ordinary the eternal abyss yawns. The earth gives me back what it hid. ~Carl Jung; Red Book
228 In 1944 in Psychology und Alchemy, Jung referred to an alchemical representation of a circle quadrated by four “rivers” in the context of a discussion of mandala symbolism (CW 12, §167n). Jung commented on the four rivers of paradise on a number of occasions-see, for instance, Aion, CW §§2, 9, 3II, 353, 358, 372.
Footnotes from The Red Book:
229 Inscription: “XI. MCMXIX. [II. 1919: This date seems to refer to when this image was painted.] This stone, set so beautifully, is certainly the Lapis Philosophorum.
It is harder than diamond. But it expands into space through four distinct qualities, namely breadth, height, depth, and time. It is hence invisible and you can pass
through it without noticing it. The four streams of Aquarius flow from the stone. This is the incorruptible seed that lies between the father and the mother and prevents the heads of both cones from touching: it is the monad which countervails the Pleroma.” On the pleroma, see below p. 347- Concerning the reference to the incorruptible seed, see the dialogue with Ha in the note to image 94, p. 297, n. 157 above.
230 On June 3,1918, Jung’s soul described Philemon as the joy of the earth: “The daimons become reconciled in the one who has found himself who is the source of all
four streams, of the source-bearing earth. From his summit waters flow in all four directions. He is the sea that bears the sun; he is the mountain that carries the sun; he is the father of all four great streams; he is the cross that binds the four great daimons. He is the incorruptible seed of nothingness, which falls accidentally through space. This seed is the beginning, younger than all other beginnings, older than all endings” (Black Book 7, p. 61). Some of the motifs in this statement may have some connections with this image. There is a gap between July 1919 and February 1920 in Black Book 7, during which time Jung was presumably writing psychological Types.
On February 23 he made the following entry: “What lies between appears in the book of dreams, but even more in the images of the red book” (p. 88). In “Dreams”
Jung noted around eight dreams during this period, and a vision at night in August 1919 of two angels, a dark transparent mass, and a young woman. This suggests
that the symbolic process continues in the paintings in the calligraphic volume, which do not appear to have direct cross-references to either the text in Liber Novus
or the Black Books. In 1935, Jung put forward a psychological interpretation of the symbolism of medieval alchemy, viewing the philosopher’s stone-the goal of the
alchemical opus-as a symbol of the self (Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12).
